The history of imperialism is taught today as a catalogue of outrages but such a narrow focus is not illuminating. There were too many variants to reach any sweeping conclusion. I learned my version at the feet of the Indian historian Anil Seal at Cambridge, and the story he taught was that the British empire in India took over the existing Mughal administration lock, stock, and barrel, one set of foreigners displacing another.
It rested on alliances with ruling princes. It evolved through many iterations – each starkly different – and the core objective was trade and captive markets, not the same as extraction, nota bene. It is for Indians to judge the moral quality of the Raj in all its aspects with the distance of time. I doubt that hard-Left agitators bent on tearing down every vestige of colonialism in London have much grasp of the subject.
All great protests have a specific objective: Catholic emancipation; the vote for suffragettes; or the US civil rights movement, targeting the legal architecture of racial segregation that still existed in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Black Lives Matter movement – and especially its sympathy protests in Europe – is rich in emotion but frustratingly unfocussed by comparison.
America has been striving for half a century to overcome the legacy of racial injustice and the sort of reflexes that led to the police killing of George Floyd. That is what Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was all about. Failure is not entirely for lack of trying. That is what makes this case so doubly sad.
But at the risk of sounding old-fashioned: all lives matter. British society should be wary of entering too deeply into this sort of race politics.
A colour-blind social and political system – all equal in the eyes of the law and the state institutions – took a long time coming and is a shining feature of modern liberal democracies. I reject the fashionable argument that defence of this ideal is implicitly racist, supposedly because it justifies a status quo of exploitation, to borrow from Marxist diction.
We have moved through the gears from the goal of equal opportunity, to the goal of equal outcomes, and from there to the jurisprudence of hate crimes, with different prison tariffs depending on racial motive, arriving at a point where everything is filtered through the prism of race and sectoral interests.
Whether they know it or not, proponents of our ‘re-racialised’ society are drawing on the toolkit of empires through the ages. Imperial systems manage their ethnic and religious cauldrons with a panoply of special codes, protections, laws, and classifications.
Such a method of governance is inimical to liberal values. We risk coming full circle.